


defect

by That_Ghost_Kristoff



Series: into the desert [13]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Didn't Leave the Jedi Order, Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Force Demigod Anakin Skywalker, Gen, Human Disaster Anakin Skywalker, Hurt Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Outer Rim Planets (Star Wars), POV Barriss Offee, POV CT-7567 | Rex, Protective CT-7567 | Rex, That's Not How The Force Works (Star Wars), last POV to be determined, references to slavery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-19 06:53:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29995554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/That_Ghost_Kristoff/pseuds/That_Ghost_Kristoff
Summary: The Republic sends an army of purchased clones, peacekeepers, and child soldiers to fight its war. By the Outer Rim Sieges, that malformed army holds itself together with little more than hope and bacta patches.Featuring: attachment, injury, poor decisions, complicated pasts, and several walking disasters who really need a group hug.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, CT-7567 | Rex & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Series: into the desert [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2135958
Comments: 13
Kudos: 76





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a three-shot on different planets during the Outer Rim Sieges. I added three planets because honestly, there isn't a whole lot of information given about the time, so why not?

When the starfighter comes down, Rex is on the ground, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Nax and a shiny from the 187th whose name he doesn’t know. The clankers press in hard from the hills leading to the city and up from the surf, fencing in the troopers. Fain, a transfer from a fallen Jedi’s legion, lies six feet from Rex on the black sand with his helmet ripped away and half his face gone from the force of that beam, as dead as his old general. It’s just so  _ hot _ , Rex is thinking before the crash, what with the beach sopping up all that sunlight. There hasn’t been a single cloud since the gunship alighted, and midday is lasting forever. 

A battle droid not twenty paces from him roger-rogers to command. He raises his blaster, aims, and shoots the clanker dead between the photoreceptors, knocking its narrow head right off its neck. 

The shadow appears just after that. 

It’s a short lived thing, just there a second, but it startles him nonetheless. Automatically, he flicks his attention from the advancing droids to check the skies, so he only avoids an incoming blaster bolt because his brother from the 187th shoves him aside, down. The sharp sand scuttles away when he lands on his calves. The other clone lands beside him, the kill shot in his armour still smoking. Someone throws a grenade in an arch over Rex; it hits its target, so the fourteen clankers explode in a blistering outburst of ruptured mechanics that fly across the beach or pitch back into the sea. As he watches, he remembers General Kenobi saying as they loaded onto the gunships, “Careful not to cause too much destruction during the assault—we needn’t worsen the ecological damage.” 

So much for that, Rex thinks, but even as he’s thinking it, he’s shouting, “Men, scatter!” He’s on his feet. The whizzing’s audible now, the screech that always accompanies burning metal when it breaks through the atmosphere careening to the earth ahead of the ship. No one in the 501st or 212th needs telling twice; the 187th follow the directive half a heartbeat later. 

Rex grabs Commander Cody by the elbow during the retreat, and dives them into the milkreeds that mark the barrier between high ground and shore, before they turn. It’s the General’s newest starfighter, all right—General Skywalker, that is—the triangular Delta interceptor the Procurement Office granted him after the Anaxes crash. One wing’s cracked down the middle and the other’s missing; the centre looks ready to peel apart; the little R2 droid’s nowhere to be seen. Another starfighter follows, green instead of red. The Commander’s. She’s coming in too slow to help.

Then the General hits the sand. 

Just the General, but not the ship. He slams so violently on his side that the sound of bone snapping ricochets across the beach. The starfighter’s still bearing down, the pointed bow zeroed directly on him. When Rex moves to help, to leave the cover of the reeds, Cody grips his arm and starts, “It’s too—” but  _ late _ disappears under the bang and pop of the ship tearing into debris.

The collective call of “General!” erupts out from the men in time with the starship’s destruction and the droids’ scramble to flee ahead of the crash. Above, the Republic’s Star Destroyers battle the Seppies’ heavy cruisers, just dots and lines of flaring lights or shadows, and closer, the Commander’s interceptor zips down to help, but the updraft from the crash slows her descent. Through the smoke haze, the General’s hardly more than a shape, but Rex still catches sight of movement. It’s the arm that didn’t hit the ground directly, the real one, rising.

For a moment, all those flaming, shattered pieces hang suspended between the General and the sky. Then they plummet, all at once, to pierce into the sand in a circle around him.

Rex, Cody, and Kix reach the General first, but not fast enough to save him from the viewport. It falls last, dropping in shards after the rest of the starship like an afterthought. Kix calls for him to move. He doesn’t. He curls, throwing his arm over his head, and that’s that.

When the Commander arrives, Kix is on his knees by the General’s side while Rex and Cody bracket him, blasters at the ready to beat away any clankers who enter the newly created enclosure. “I need you not to move, sir,” Kix says between his distress calls for medevac. There’s panic in his voice, barely detectable after all that training. “General, stay still, but keep breathing. Got that, General?”

“Anakin,” the Commander says, throwing herself beside him so she slides the last foot on her legs, and nicks her scrabbling palms on the pebbles. “Hey, Kix, can you—Force, Skyguy, how are you awake?”

The General coughs wetly in answer. Out comes fluid and blood.

How the fuck is he awake indeed. The amount of transparisteel stuck through his body has got to be fatal, if they don’t get him into bacta soon. Deliberately, Rex doesn’t look, because this is  _ bad. _ Worse than any blaster wound, he thinks. Red blood slicks the transparent fragments and wells out to spill over onto the earth, where it camouflages into the sand. Even the ground’s black colour, though, can’t hide the puddle that the slice down the General’s back and side caused. The piece embedded between his ribs is as long as a clone’s forearm, and that’s just the part that Rex can see.

As the first of the commando droids clanks through the haze, he shifts his attention from his general to the threat. He purposely doesn’t think about dead Fain’s dead general, nor the other transferred troopers from that same legion, and he purposely doesn’t think about how little he understands the Force. Can overuse kill a Jedi? He’s seen his general stop an explosion, potentially bully the winds into a storm, and rip apart a fortified landing base with drugs in his system, but this—the blood, the protruding transparisteel, the broken bones—is a step beyond basic battle fatigue or worry or some sort of spice.

He and Cody take aim together, and with a collective concentrated shot, dislodge the head from an IG’s body before it charges its first laser. Behind them, on the General’s other side, the Commander deflects attacks back on the attackers; the  _ zang  _ of blaster bolts connecting and rebounding from a lightsaber is familiar, but not comforting. It’s difficult to see through the haze, which swirls higher and higher to dome above them, blotting out the sky. Half the droids blend into it, their bodies melding with the yellowed grey. Everything stinks of sulfur, seared woolsteel, and a blaster’s smoking aftershock. 

The transparisteel might have hit the General’s bones, Kix tells the Commander when she insists on knowing why he hasn’t removed any. Definitely his organs, too. 

Suddenly, Rex hears his own blood flowing through his pulse as an echo in his helmet, and finds it harder to ignore the dramatically increasing heat.

By the time the other Jedi arrive, Commander Cody is temporarily down an arm from a droideka’s lucky shot that made it through the armour’s plastoid plate, and a close proximity burn scorched a blind spot onto Rex’s visor. He tugs off the helmet as General Kenobi crouches beside Commander Tano, who still has her lightsaber drawn to protect and parry, though the fight is done. Beneath the muck and ash caking the side of the man’s face, he’s gone bloodless. He hadn’t bothered greeting anyone. Rex can’t blame him. What the three of them have, the Generals and the Commander, is  _ different  _ compared to the other Jedi. 

There’s an unspoken understanding back on Kamino that a clone trooper and the non-clone members of the GAR will never be friends, but it’s not like that with the General. Rex learned that early, all the way on the Arantara battlefield, when he thought he’d be left for dead in that trench but the General came back for him. Just four weeks ago, the General trusted Rex’s word enough to stage Echo’s mostly unsanctioned rescue. Now, this isn’t the first time the General wound up in the metaphorical mud, but it’s the first time the reason is so graphic Rex can’t make himself look.

At his feet, the General coughs. The sound’s choked and ragged. It racks his body, so the broken transparisteel imperceptibly rings.

“What happened?” General Windu asks, nearing last, and halting in front of Rex and Cody, who lower their blasters to salute. Already, reinforcements douse the fire, so the air around them cools and clears and the sky reemerges from the smoke in bright slivers. The sun hasn’t moved. “At ease, troopers,” says General Windu, then looks around him at the circle of scrap. “Did you see this?” 

“Yes, sir,” Rex says as behind him, General Kenobi says quietly, “I’m putting you to sleep now, Anakin,” because Kix’s sedative wasn’t working fast enough. Past the shrapnel heap that was once the starfighter’s broken wing lands the med-frigate, its narrow hull bouncing as its three fanning rear engines unbalance it on the sand. It shouldn’t have landed on a shore, where the ground’s too uneven to support its weight. For a ship that size to risk it, Kix signalled an emergency. That’s good, since there’s nowhere flat and stable around for miles. 

Patiently, General Windu awaits elaboration. Tearing his attention away from the frigate and the 187th troopers spilling from its body, Rex says, “Everyone saw it, sir, but there wasn’t much to see. General Skywalker landed, but there was too much smoke.”

Though this is not true, and Cody knows it, his friend doesn’t correct him. By now, the 501st and 212th know to guard their generals’ oddities close, even from superiors. General Windu sighs, peers over his shoulder, and waves his troopers into the wreckage as the Commander asks Kix, “But will he be okay? Are you sure?”

“I don’t know, sir,” he answers. “I’m sorry, Commander. General. We’ll have a better idea after the surgery.” 

“Skywalker needs surgery?” General Windu says, stepping around Cody and the General to fall in beside the Commander as the 187th men wobble over the sand with a stretcher. “What’s the internal damage?” 

Again, Kix says, “I don’t know, sir,” and adds, “Not the full extent. Fractures in his bones on both sides. His left wrist took the worst of it. This fragment would have damaged the ribs. I think it pierced a lung. There’s probably more, but I won’t know without scans. His prosthetic seems to have absorbed most of the hit when he landed, but that’ll have its own issues. Nerve damage at the connection point is what I’m guessing.”

“Can you remove the transparisteel here? Or will he survive with it in there for a while?”

“What, sir? I’d advise—”

The second assault’s first casualty is the clone trooper carrying the stretcher’s frontal weight. That’s all the warning they have before the next wave pours out from the hills and reeds. 

Midday on Murkhana’s southwestern hemisphere lasts a while, but not forever. By the time the battle’s won, the clankers routed from the countryside and pushed out from the city, day’s given over to night. From the med centre’s window, Rex looks out across the hills and the beaches and the sea. The sand soaks in the moonlight the way it had the sun, so the twisting stretch between the chalk high ground and the water has an uncanny likeness to an unwanted thought, rather than takes on the look of physical space. From here, from a fourth floor window in the city on the low range’s highest summit, he watches General Windu direct his men in clean-up down between the ratty berry trees that dot the hillside and down on the nothingness. By now, the wreckage is missing. They must have cleared that before Rex ever reached a decent vantage point. 

This vantage point is the med centre’s waiting area. He stands, back to the room to watch the going-ons below. Seated beside him in a plasticast chair the same shade as the 501st’s armour paint is the Commander, her elbows on her knees and spine bowed so she can press her eyes into her palms. Beside her is General Kenobi, slumped low against the stiff back with the General’s lightsaber still clutched loosely in his hand and his stare fixed on the door to the surgery Kix appropriated when they arrived. This whole place was empty for them, so there was no one to fight with for room access; Murkhana City is already well and truly dead. Deserted. A holo running nonstop by ground floor reception informed them to gather only their essential belongings and meet at their nearest evac stations for further instructions. Probably there were more around town at one point, but the invading Seppies destroyed them. The one here was only spared because an army of metal parts and wires doesn’t need bacta or intensive care. 

For the citizens’ sake, Rex hopes they went into that western mountain range, because the troops just forced the invaders out east.

Abruptly, the Commander says, “Isn’t it his birthday soon, Master? He can’t die a couple weeks before his birthday.” Out of the corner of his eye, he watches her raise her head. Glance once at General Kenobi, then at the door marked with an isk, cresh, and usk in orange paint that glints in the moonlight. Somewhere, Cody directs the technicians in the 212th and 501st in returning the med centre to full power, but they only managed a few individual surgeries or bacta halls so far; this waiting room, as a space of lesser importance, is lit with wide silver bands that pinstripe the muddied floor.

“Anakin won’t die, Ahsoka,” General Kenobi says, as exhausted as Rex feels. The exhaustion’s so thick he feels it in his fingertips. “He has far too much pride to die in a crash.” 

“It just took  _ so long  _ to—” She doesn’t finish. 

But she’s right. It took  _ so long  _ to get the General here, away from an active warzone. Kix went from saying, “It’s too much of a risk to remove any of it here,” to talking Rex through battlefield surgery. There’s blood caked onto his armour. His hands are still sticky where more seeped through his gloves. Scrubbing it down will take a night and a day, probably. The laundry droid needs a run or two at the cloth.

Realistically, he should be with the men, but in the past four years, in the three occasions he was injured enough to spend a night unconscious on a medbay cot, he knows the General spent time waiting for him to wake. Rex only woke to find the man there once, nodding to sleep in a visitor’s chair with a bacta patch slapped over the back of his hand, but he heard about the others. Clones and their Jedi Generals aren’t meant to be friends, traditionally, but Rex knows he’s safe in saying that isn’t the case here. The General’s his friend, just like he was Fives’, and Echo’s, and Hardcase and Tup’s and Jesse’s and Kix’s and also Cody’s, and fuck, almost all the Jedi are better at treating Rex and his brothers like people than the average Republic resident, but the only three to regularly break bread with the troops are the two here beside him and the one stuck behind that door. 

Sometimes, Rex thinks it would be better if they conformed closer to the norm. The General and the Commander have waited by his cot in the medbay. General Kenobi has waited by Cody’s. More often, it’s been them or their brothers waiting by theirs. 

Rex thought last year would be the worst of it. Last year, he survived the nightmare that was Umbara and Krell and all that came with it, then had the General collapse in front of him as the Kadavo landing platform’s guard towers gave way around them. That was bad enough, even before Rex learned—the rest. The General, he found out after, hadn’t realised he was there.

Fucking Krell, on Umbara, said straight out that the General and the Commander were too soft. “They’re just a couple of kids,” Krell said when Rex questioned his plans by positioning them against the ones the General already plotted, “who think they understand war.” He said it was just luck, and the enemy’s missteps that kept the 501st alive. He said, later, during the short break he hadn’t allowed them but they took regardless, “I should have guessed Skywalker would give his clones too long a leash. Everyone knows he grew up wrong,” like he was talking to himself, but loud enough that he meant Rex to hear. 

Not long after, he coordinated it so the 501st and the Wolfpack shot each other down. Rex would like to say that logic won out now that it’s over, that there’s no blip in their genetic code that keeps his men from trusting the Republic officers and Jedi as easily as they had before, but that would be a lie. Even so, he trusts the General. He trusts the other two here, waiting with him. He doesn’t know if he trusts General Windu, even if he should. Especially not now, after what happened with Fives.

He goes to rub his hand over his head, but stops, because the movement releases the sickly metallic stench of old blood. Next to him, the Commander coughs, and wrinkles her nose, but doesn’t mention it. Neither does General Kenobi, if he notices. Maybe he doesn’t. He has General Skywalker’s blood on his hands, too. 

Down on the beach, the clean-up crew crowds onto a squatting gunship. General Kenobi includes his head towards the window as it takes off, listening. It rises in the air, lists on a draft, and drifts towards the city, its bulbous hull swaying on the wind. After a beat, he says, “Mace will be here in a bit. I suspect he and his men will leave within the next day or so.” 

“Another mission?” the Commander asks, straightening her back to lean against the chair. “Or back home?” 

“Home,” he says. In his thin reflection on the window, Rex watches as he teases the corner of the bacta patch pasted on the nape of his neck. “The Council prefers not to have him away from Coruscant for long.”

“Think that’ll be us soon?” she says. “Because of this. Has he ever been this messed up before? It seemed even worse than the thing with the Lurmens. Remember the Lurmens, Rex? That sure was wild.”

“Can’t forget them, sir,” he says without pause, though he doesn’t do more than glance down and over in her direction. They know he’s listening. He’s too close to do otherwise. 

That time on Maridun, when General Secura checked under General Skywalker’s tunic to catalogue his injuries before heading out, he mostly looked bruised. A few burns, a couple cracked ribs, a scrape on his side. All the damage from the blast he blocked was on the inside. Rex spent that day and night protecting him alone from the monsters lurking in the grass, and was still ineffective enough that the General ripped himself out of unconsciousness to warn him of the impending attack. 

The General wasn’t there on Saleucami when Rex took a bolt to the heart and stayed half a rotation with the deserter’s family. Likewise, he missed the General’s last truly bloody mess, the one that trapped him under a condemned ship on Vanqor. They were both there on Geonosis when General Kenobi bashed himself up in the gunship crash so severely he couldn’t stand, and more recently on Cato Neimoidia, when a crumbling roof tile slammed the Commander in the head with enough force to scar her lek. On Kamino, the trainers prep the practice squads for the high probability of death or crippling disability, and the standard procedures to follow when a superior is down. What they don’t prep upcoming soldiers for—what Rex and his brothers were bred for but don’t get until it happens, if it happens—is the bubbling, persistent nausea that follows feeling a friend’s pulse weaken under their hands. 

From the moment Rex had the ability to understand language, his trainers taught him that he was bred for war. “War is being one of the many,” the first teacher said from the front of his Year 1 classroom, the only one that wasn’t a lecture theatre. She was a bounty hunter, like Fett. All the trainers were. She said, “War is war is war. Blood and violence and shooting the enemy before they shoot you,” and grinned to show off all her needle-like teeth. 

She kicked her heels against the desk to punctuate her point. The kicking’s why the words stuck; that rhythm never left his head. 

When General Windu enters, he has blood on his face and clothes that aren’t his and so much black sand ingrained into his tunic that it’s difficult to believe it was ever any other colour. “At ease, Captain,” he says before Rex can even finish his salute, and stops halfway between the waiting room entrance and the back wall windows. “Still in surgery?”

“For now,” General Kenobi says. “Ah, the power.” 

The glowpanels on the ceiling flicker once, then stay on, illuminating the room in a med centre’s usual industrustial light, which is too sharp and too white with a low frequency hum that creates a toothache. As the Commander squints, blinking rapidly, General Windu folds his arms and says, “I’m leaving with my men tomorrow morning. Once we’re certain that the city is secure. You’ll be staying on until Kit gets here. If Skywalker’s not cleared to leave by then, the 501st will stay on instead and Kit will join you on Desargorr, Obi-Wan.”

Outside, something explodes and cracks, but none of them look, and before General Kenobi can answer, the surgery door opens. Kix emerges, peeling off his face mask and free already of his sterile gloves. In the second before the door shuts, Rex spies two medical droids washing down an operating table. 

Kix salutes, mostly for General Windu’s benefit. “General Skywalker is in a bacta tank, sirs,” he says. “He’ll make a full recovery.”

At the declaration, the tightness Rex had actively ignored loosens in his chest, but it only worsens the severity of his exhaustion. He needs sleep. He doesn’t even know where his brothers set the barracks. 

“Will there be lasting damage?” General Kenobi asks, as the Commander, who’s already standing, says, “Can we see him?” 

With a quick glance between the two of them, Kix says, “Yes, Commander Tano,” and, “I shouldn’t think so, General. We removed the transparisteel and set the bones back into position. A couple nights in bacta and sleep should handle the rest. Yes, General Kenobi. He’s sedated.”

Jedi, or at least these particular Jedi, aren’t as good at listening to a medic’s advice as a clone. On Kamino, Rex and his brothers learned early that it was a moral duty to watch their backs, because if they managed to stay healthy, they could continue to defend the Republic. More than just clones must understand the truth in that, especially Jedi. Apparently, for these three, the lesson didn’t stick.

When the Commander ventures through the surgery and out into the connected bacta hall, Rex follows. She expects as much, and anyway, it’s what he wants. They leave the generals behind to talk. Before the door shuts entirely, he hears General Windu say, “All of it will have to go into my report to the Council, Obi-Wan,” then General Kenobi answer, “It’s not as though it’s Anakin’s first crash—”

The door slams.

Not all the bacta tanks are operational, Rex and the Commander find, and the power in the room is spotty, leaving every other glowpanel darkened and half of those that are functional blinking intermittently. There are no windows. When she says, “Eerie, huh, Rex?” her voice bounces in a watery echo.

Though there’s no chance of a Seppie attack here, Rex’s heartbeat jumps. “That it is, Commander,” he says as his hand brushes instinctively against his blaster. His nerves are suddenly too sore, too tweaked from over-wakefulness and battle fatigue and concern.

Of course, they set the General in one of the few working tanks at the end. Frequently, Rex forgets that the man’s tall, but he’s not very big. Stripped down to too-short patient trousers and a shirt like a box with a breathing apparatus secured over his nose and mouth, he doesn’t look much like the same General Skywalker who just a number of days ago effectively assassinated Admiral Trench. He didn’t say he did it, but everyone knew. It’s unlikely that Trench was alive for the explosion.

The Commander lays her palm flat on the tank. “I can’t feel him,” she says, voice low and eyes downcast. He shifts, as out of his depth as he always is when the Jedi mention sensing one another. “Sort of, but not really.” 

“Kix says he’s going to live, Commander,” he says, frowning. “He’s never made a mistake yet. Doubt he’ll be starting now.”

Sighing, she says, “He took a hit from the medical frigate,” as she drops her hand to wrap her arms around herself and focus on the General’s mangled prosthetic. “A turbolaser bolt took off his fighter’s wing. I tried to get there to catch him, but. You saw. I wasn’t fast enough.”

“I don’t think anyone could’ve been,” Rex says, “unless they were crashing too, sir. He came in too hot from the atmosphere.”

“He would’ve,” she says, “if it were me.” 

Her voice cracks. He doesn’t know what to say, so he settles with saying nothing. When General Kenobi enters and reaches them, Rex excuses himself. He finds Kix in the lobby, where he repeats tersely to anyone from the thinning crowd who asks that yes, General Skywalker will be fine, and no, he will not be providing any more details. After the confidentiality breach following the attack on Umbara and the General’s mission to Zygerria with General Kenobi, Kix has grown even more cautious than he already was about information leaks. It was after that when the 501st present on the  _ Resolute  _ figured out the General is the way he is with the troops because he isn’t all that different from them. Fives says they’ve all got chips in their brains, but the General’s got one already.

Though Rex never agreed with Slick, who called his brothers enslaved, nor the deserter, who said the only reason any of them cared for the Republic is because that’s what they were programmed to believe, he knows how he felt when he told Krell that his plan would kill too many men, and the general answered, “That’s what you were made for, CT-Seven-Five-Six-Seven.” He said it, and in less than a day, Rex watched Hardcase die.

“You see the General?” Kix asks when Rex is close enough for him to lower his voice. He sags sideways against the reception counter, beside the button for the holo, which someone mercifully powered down. “The Commander and General Kenobi with him?” 

Rex nods. “You did good,” he says, and scares away an approaching Republic staff sergeant with a glare. “Did, uh. Did General Windu give you a rough time?” General Windu wasn’t happy when he landed on the beach, and he wasn’t happy in the waiting room. Before Umbara and Krell, Rex trusted all Jedi unconditionally with his life and the lives of his men, but it’s been a while since he trusted most of them with the General’s. 

Shaking his head, Kix says, “General Kenobi got the worst of it. They were having at it about mission reports and, you know. ‘Attachment.’ Any idea where the barracks are, Captain?”

“No. I was hoping you would.” Cody will know, Rex thinks. He usually does.

“Damn.” Kix sighs. “Hey, I found where the ’freshers are with the sanistreams here in the med centre. Bet we can get hot water before anyone else discovers them.” 

They steal hot water in the sub-basement ’freshers, where Rex scours the sand and dried saltwater and the General’s blood from his skin with soap that reeks of disinfectant. Outside the cubicle, more glowpanels fritz, so shadowy shapes appear and disappear on the checkered walls. Though Rex tries not to, he sees, as an afterimage, the General curled unconscious on his side on the black sand, his arm covering his head and riddled with the runny-red shards. The fragment dug between his ribs that Rex had to pull out and out and out. 

In the moment, when he eased transparisteel free from his friend’s body to let Kix do his work, Rex took in the jagged fragment discarded at his knees and the dark, dark life’s blood welling from the gash, and thought,  _ So this is tonight’s then. I’ll be stabbing the General with his own viewport. _

Most nights, he dreams about killing Jedi. Sometimes the Commander, sometimes General Kenobi, sometimes others. Usually, though, it’s the General. Usually, the method of killing comes from something real—setting an explosion rather than saving the General from the aftermath, or shoving him below the water to drown. It’s not right and it’s not good and it’s not something any of the three are ever learning. Still, Rex knows the pattern. The pattern means that tonight, he’s digging that shard in instead of sliding it out.

To avoid it, he also avoids sleep that night. He thoroughly cleanses his armour until the memory is gone, and formally replaces his gloves with a new pair. The next few days pass the way they always do after securing a major base, especially one that’s deserted: organising search parties with Cody to send into the mountains for the refugees, and when they come back wounded and beaten from a skirmish with the clankers, devising new plans; organising scouting parties and coordinating a foodstuffs search for perishables that will rot on store shelves if they aren’t eaten soon; checking regularly with the Commander and General Kenobi; tracking intercepted transmissions for any approaching ships. He does intercept the Seppies’ return before they reach Murkhana, but on too much of a delay to stop the new blockade. The same day, the General wakes. 

He searches out Rex when he’s alone in the communications tower, the one in the city centre with a view of the hills and the beach. “I heard you saved my life,” the General says, with that grin of his that General Kenobi calls cheeky, as he rests his weight against the control panel. “Thanks, Rex. Hopefully I won’t have to return the favour, but I will if it comes to it.”

“I know that, sir,” Rex says, leaning back in the comm room’s swivelling chair so the stem bends and creaks. Sunlight pours in through bulging windows, but the nonreflective coating on the equipment means that the only metal catching the light is the splint poking out from the General’s bandages. His prosthetic, at least, seems back in working order. Rex adds, “I’m just glad I could help.”

“How about you?” the General asks, nodding at Rex. “Did you get away all right?” 

“Can’t complain,” he says, which is mostly true. He wasn’t injured, but he most certainly did complain about how long it took to remove the soot from his visor. “The city’s secure, General. Any plans for the blockade?” 

With a single-shoulder shrug and an almost-scowl, the General says, “Obi-Wan says we have to let Master Fisto handle it. Hear anything from him yet?”

“It’s silent on that end,” Rex answers. “General Kenobi got out a transmission yesterday, but we haven’t gotten anything else to or from the Republic since. Even before that was touch and go.” 

They discuss the weather and tactics for halfway to an hour before the General’s comlink flashes and the Commander’s voice scratches out, demanding to know where he went. “Sorry, Snips,” he says, and grimaces when he shifts to stand on his own without the support of the control panel. “Don’t tell her or Obi-Wan I was here if they come asking, okay, Rex?”

“Sure, General,” Rex says, but warily. If he had to guess, someone cautioned the General against climbing unstable spiral stairs.

He leaves with a backward wave and a claim that Rex is the best,  _ really. _ In his absence, the dust settles, paralysed in the sunlight. When Rex peeks below at the tower’s surrounding garden and entry pavement, he spies the Commander, poised with her hands on her hips and one foot tapping, as the General gesticulates in self-defense and the little R2 droid rocks. Yesterday Rex dreamed he shot her in the back of her head, right in the roof tile scar. Two nights ago, he woke from a nightmare about his general and broken shards. Fives was right, he keeps thinking, or maybe hoping. Fives was right about them all having chips in their brains that make these dreams, because it’s better than the alternative, that if Fives was mistaken, then the General can call Rex the best,  _ really _ , all he wants, but the truth is, he’s just another defective clone who never should wormed his way out of maintenance. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barriss meets Ahsoka again on Desargorr.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally meant for this to be in Ahsoka's POV, but then this happened.

The erkinite firestarter pops beneath the tented greenwood when the flames’ heat finally exceeds its breaking point.  _ Bang! _ it goes, flaring up towards the starlit sky, as across the pit, Anakin Skywalker and Master Kenobi laugh together to reach almost equal volume. Skywalker says, “Sure you are, Snips,” and flicks the end of Ahsoka’s lek where it rests against her back. “Lux still says he’ll comm’ you back.”

“I can’t  _ believe _ you answered my comlink,” she says, indignant, so he shoots back that she answers theirs all the time, remember? It’s only fair to return the favour. 

In the light of the bright-burning fire, the three of them are the perfect snapshot of inadvisable attachment. On Barriss’ side of the pit, she and Master Unduli occupy the shaved log’s insubstantial cushions at an acceptable distance apart with Berin Dyyr, the settlement’s Twi’lek foreman, and his human wife Thema. Husband and wife sit close together, sharing one of the scratchy blankets and a mug of the hot liquor they passed out to the rest of them with a wink, their ankles crossed over one another’s. They haven’t said much beyond pleasantries to Master Unduli and Barriss, but she sees that somehow, they find the earlier arrivals  _ charming. _ Across the circle, the early arrivals relocated to the dirt some time ago, stretched out on their cloaks to be closer to the fire. The gaps left between are there, but negligible. She watches them warily; the light turns their eyes too glossy, the shadows on their bodies too dark. Between the shadow and the light, Skywalker and Ahsoka’s grins are just on the edge of manic. The scar down his face doesn’t help, though even before he earned it, Barris always thought of him as a little feral. What a shame, she thinks as she watches them, that he infected Ahsoka with his wildness. One Skywalker was bad enough. Now there’s two. 

This is not where Barriss wants to be, if she could ever claim to want to be anywhere out here on the front. For the past three weeks, she and Master Unduli have spent their time routing the Separatists from Desargorr’s western hemisphere, moving from pole to pole, or plotting how to temper Skywalker and Master Kenobi’s rash schemes. Today, midway through the first week of the fifth month and four months into what the holojournals are calling the Outer Rim Sieges, was always meant to be their rendezvous. They weren’t expecting to find that the others had already been here, waiting, for three days.

_ Here _ doesn’t have an official name. Cartographically, the mining town is a dot on the southern tip of the southeastern hemisphere’s longest mountain range, marked with a six and an aurek. The aurebesh refers to the continents, Master Unduli said—aurek, besh, cresh, and cherek—and the numbers determine the order of settlement. Unofficially, Dyyr claimed the residents call this place Firstlight, because it’s the first inhabited settlement on the planet to see the sunrise. It’s a more romantic name than it deserves, as the settlement is just a haphazard collection of shanties clinging tipsily to the stone and lichen with the jagged mountain peaks as their backdrop and drying lines connecting them in a hole-ridden web. Moonlight reflects from the metal roofs. There’s no transparisteel covering their windows, but the dull yellow glow from portable lumas sneaks through the gaps in the shutters. One of the Republic’s “ethical” mining corporations owns the Desargorr system, conning the desperate to settle and work under the promise of a fair wage and free housing, except that the currency isn’t legitimate off-system and from the look of it, discovering a working sonic shower anywhere on the premises would be a shock. They’re only “ethical” because they don’t use slave labour to work the mining shafts.

Of course, the War permits these corporations to thrive. It’s just another facet of this conflict that leaves Barriss feeling ill. 

Master Kenobi stretches languidly. “There are worse messages to intercept on a comlink,” he says, and sets down his mug. It’s empty. Thema called the liquor sunshine, a name that’s accurate for its colour and the scorching it gives the drinker’s throat; no one but he and Master Unduli have managed to finish theirs yet, though the politeness deems they all should by the night’s end.

“That was your own damn fault,” Skywalker says, folding his arms. “Hey, how’d  _ your  _ meeting go?”

“Perfectly lovely.” 

“Of course?”

“Of course.” 

With a melodramatic groan, Ahsoka says, “She’s never lovely, Master,” and cringes when she sips her drink.

When Barriss instinctively attempts to catch her master’s eye, the other woman ignores her, her focus instead on Master Kenobi as she says, “Is it not unwise to have...liaisons out here, Kenobi?” For the past few months, Master Unduli has avoided Barriss more and more—she does not, Barriss suspects, know or want to know what her padawan did, but she is suspicious. Their training bond by now is nearly nonexistent. Master Unduli hardly speaks to her if it isn’t necessary. As a result, all Barriss seems to discuss these days is the War. 

If there’s ever such a thing as divine punishment, as many cultures across the galaxy believe, then perhaps this is it. 

Skywalker says, “That’s one word for it,” and sinks lower against the log. Though Master Kenobi’s arm twitches, as though he means to knock Skywalker with his elbow, he aborts the movement. It’s obvious, but the others don’t acknowledge it. Instead, Ahsoka looks across the fire for the first time, and catches Barriss’ eye with a smile, as though she means to share a private joke. Automatically, Barriss returns the gesture, even as she watches them—Master Kenobi relaxed nearly to the point of boredom, Ahsoka not touching but leaning towards her master, Skywalker brimming with so much energy the very air seems to vibrate—and thinks,  _ You ruined  _ everything. 

The drink races down her throat as Skywalker says, too fast and too accented, “So, Berin. Thema. One of you want to check the trap placements with me before we split?” 

“’Course, General,” says Dyyr, as he passes the mug over to his wife. A portion of his left lek is missing, and his skin is the same colour as the bonfire’s paler undertones. “We’ll be bringing the older glowrods. Thema here will make sure we’ve got the lunch ready for taking.”

Though Barriss wants to protest that  _ no, _ these people shouldn’t be providing them food, not when they have so little themselves and the army has their rations for a reason, Skywalker’s already asking, “Either of you coming with me?” 

He means them, her and Master Unduli, who says, “I can accompany you,” and adds, after a pause, “Traps?”

Together, in a jumbled, non-linear mess, the others across the pit explain their plan: hide the workers and the families down in the inoxium shafts, since those tunnels are the ones with the best natural airflow, see, now that the troops set deflector shield generators and droid popper traps—but no explosives. They’ll split into groups, with a squad and a Jedi or two stationed down with the workers and their families, and the rest in the town waiting to ambush the ambushing party. The amount of inoxium integrated into the siltstone below their feet disrupts the Separatists’ scans for lifeforms, Skywalker explains, which they discovered a couple weeks back. As long as they hide out in the passages under the town and the mine shafts, they’re all undetectable when the Separatists attack tonight, which they will, once he sets the primary trap in motion. Easy as that. Then he smiles. It’s crooked. Ahsoka rolls her eyes. The firelight highlights the three of them in gold, like the perfect propaganda figures for this miserable War that Skywalker especially turned out to be. 

Earlier, Barriss and her master discussed contingencies if he already had a plan prepared, but Master Unduli offers no protest now. “The padawans can guard the workers” is all she says, as calm as ever. 

On the last occasion Barriss worked with Ahsoka inside a tunnel under the earth, the two nearly died. Barriss had nightmares for a week, between the catacomb collapse and the Geonosian worms, until Master Unduli sat her down and helped her meditate her fear into the Force. Clearly, Skywalker offered Ahsoka no such assistance, because even as Barriss agrees, the other padawan’s knee jerks. “Hey, no,” she says, gaze flitting from one side of the pit to the other. Discomfort radiates from her, poorly shielded. “You sat me out in the last fight, Skyguy. You  _ promised _ it wasn’t happening again.” 

Unsurprisingly, the three across the fire dissolve into their usual bickering; surprisingly, Master Unduli allows them to drag her into the argument. When Barriss excuses herself, no one but the foreman and his wife spare her more than a passing acknowledgement. Thema smiles wanly and unfurls from her husband’s side. “Mind if I join you?” she asks, so Barriss, stiff and reluctant, acquiesces. 

Like her husband, Thema is on the shorter end of average for her species and sex, with hard muscle filling out her coat sleeves and calluses on her fingers. “I’m needing to make the last batch of pastry,” she says, rolling her shoulders beneath her layers as she raises her hands to cup around her mouth, exhaling into them. “If you’re looking for a spell of quiet, ma’am,” she says, “you’re welcome to bide with me awhile.”

“The pastry?”

“For the pasties.” She cocks her head in Barriss’ direction and quirks one nonexistent brow for good measure. They pass out of the limits of the fire, plunging them into shadow. “You like pasties, don’t you?”

Uncomfortable, she says, “I can’t say I’ve tried a—is ‘pasty’ the singular? But you needn’t go through the trouble of making any for me. My master and I have ra—”

Thema’s pale eyes narrow, still visible from the strength of two low moons. “You don’t want my cooking, Commander?”

“No, no,” Barriss says quickly. “I just—” She hesitates, aware that she misstepped, but unsure as to how. “I would love one,” she says finally. “Thank you. What is it?” 

“Miner’s lunch,” the other woman answers, relaxing. She leads Barriss under three crossed drying lines, all free of their linens but not their pegs, and around a water pump, where she nods to an Ugnaught closing her shutters. Overhead, a nocturnal bird flies close to the rooftops, gliding on the idle breeze, before banking to left towards the valley. “Pastry wrapped around filling. Handheld lunch, with all you’re needing to stay active down there, and good tasting, too. We bake it. Others fry it. Meat, legumes, veg. Some combination of the like. We’re the veg sort ourselves. Ever had pherrerkorn?”

When Barriss admits that no, she has not, Thema explains pherrerkorn as the settlement’s primary spice. Bit like chile, but with that black peppercorn bite as an aftertaste, she says. Inside her house, a single-room shack with a metal door and metal shutters and metal walls that all lack locks or security measures, she indicates a row of the pherrerkorns drying in their flaxen husks above the gasser. The whole space smells as peppery as the promised aftertaste, so within minutes, Barriss is at war with herself not to sneeze. There’s one small table in the centre that seats three with a portable luma hanging above it from a wire, two cots on the far wall pushed together and two locked crates beside them, an egg-shaped something stuffed beneath, and a second door next to the kitchen area. A calendar above the bed is not C.R.C. Skywalker would understand it, Barriss thinks. More than likely, it’s the one from Lothal. 

If the foreman’s wife notices her taking stock of her impoverished household, she doesn’t consider it worth a comment. “Are you wanting tea?” she asks without turning around. Already, she set a kettle on the stove and two mugs on what passes for the countertop, so Barriss can’t refuse. At Thema’s directive, Barriss slides out a chair, which creaks on uneven legs over the floorless ground, and sits opposite the beds and the calendar.

The tea smells atrocious and tastes worse, but she thanks the woman anyway. Without her coat, Thema is smaller than expected, and the thin braid that tumbles from her hat falls to her waist. She procures a bowl from somewhere, then her pastry ingredients. When she sets up her workspace on the countertop and starts humming a quiet, unfamiliar song, Barriss knows she’s free from any obligations of conversation. 

This is good. These days, lifeforms, she finds, are simply exhausting. She had a plan to make a statement about the War, a harsh one that would garner enough attention to help those like Thema and the others in this sorry excuse for an “ethical” settlement, and the three she needs to cooperate with tonight utterly ruined it when the blockade around Cato Neimoidia confined them on-planet. With ease, Barriss managed a bombing in the Temple hangar that showcased the Order’s growing complacency, but who she required for her statement was Ahsoka. Ahsoka has a reputation as a padawan who finds too much enjoyment in a fight, a connection traced back to her master; if she were the one responsible, then Barriss would prove with far more efficiency the deep impact and disturbing repercussions of the conflict than if she exposed herself, as someone known already as discomfited by active warfare. Someone like Ahsoka would prove that the War had finally reached Coruscant, and like the rest of the galaxy, that it reached it through a volatile Jedi. More than that, Barriss needed Ahsoka because Ahsoka trusts her. She liked Ahsoka—still likes her quite a bit, really—but despite Barriss’ best efforts, she was unable to formulate a plan that rested on Skywalker instead. 

Not that it mattered in the end. In the end, four months later, she’s right back where started, awaiting orders with the Skywalker-Kenobi team on some boondocks Outer Rim planet seeped in squalor and the Republic’s exploitation. The Republic and the Order still believe it was a suicide bombing, and a woman with three exclamation marks drawn on her calendar and an empty pram under two pushed-together cots in a floorless shanty is making the GAR pastries. Though she never thought the GAR was out doing good work, she thought, once, that Master Kenobi was a brilliant Jedi and a decent man, and saw Ahsoka as a friend. Now, apparently, they’re as attached as Skywalker and almost as unpredictable. It’s the War that tarnished them, just like it did Master Unduli. That’s what all this fighting does, Barriss learned: it takes all goodness, and snuffs it out. Light Side, Dark Side. How arbitrary this binary has become. 

She lost a friend in the bombing. Tutso Mara. At the time, she saw his death as a sacrifice for a necessary cause. But thanks to  _ fucking  _ Skywalker—

Really. What a waste.

When she sips her tea, it scalds her tongue and her throat. The taste is still noxious, but it’s better than the sunshine. A gust rattles the shutters. Thema removes the next two trays from the gasser to place on the stove to cool, and shoos off Barriss’ offer to clean for her. Outside, not far away, someone laughs, followed by another. Clone troopers. These days, their voices are as familiar to her now as her own conscience. 

At night, when she dreams of nano droids and midday meals, the clones and their mess halls rarely make an appearance. It’s been Master Unduli more than once. Tusto. Occasionally Ahsoka or Master Windu or Master Kenobi or others from the Temple. Often, it’s Skywalker. 

Barriss hears Ahsoka before she arrives, the younger padawan’s excited chatter carrying between the shacks on the wind. “Anakin says,” Barris makes out, and then: “I’m not scared, Rex! I just want to be where the action is, you know? They promised.” 

Her knock echoes faintly around the square home, bouncing from metal wall to metal wall. Before Barriss can move, Thema shakes her hands free of water and crosses the room in four strides to tug open the door. “Hey there, Commander,” she says, ushering them inside. “Captain. Here to help with the carrying?” 

“General Kenobi sent us,” Captain Rex says, before noticing Barriss. “Commander Offee,” he says, nodding to her as Ahsoka informs the foreman’s wife that they can draft more troopers if the job requires more than just them, but Thema claims that no, just the four of them will be more than enough, and also to wait while she retrieves the ones she made this morning. Yes, Captain Rex can come, if he wants.

Then they disappear through the second door, and suddenly, Barriss and Ahsoka are alone for the first time in over a year.

“It’s good to see you, Barriss,” the younger girl says, softening down to what Barriss considers her usual self. The low-quality yellow glow from the luma sways her shadow over the far wall, tall and cat-like, even with her hood encasing her montrals. She’s grown. “How’ve you been? You seem a little—”

What Barriss seems Ahsoka keeps to herself. Shrugging, Barriss says, “I’ve been fine,” and stands, careful not to topple to the chair. “How about you?” 

Ahsoka’s forehead knits, but her concern is fleeting. “It’s been, you know,” she says with a shrug of her own as she tucks her hands behind her back. Barriss folds her arms. “Out here’s just so hectic, right? How long’ve you been here? The Outer Rim, I mean. It’s been, Force. Four months, I guess. For us.” 

“This is our first campaign,” she answers. “Master Unduli and I have been on Coruscant since the end of last year.”

“That long? Really? How—”

As the second door opens again, she stops. Thema and the 501st’s Clone Captain enter, their arms laden with handwoven baskets filled with the same half-moon pies cooling on the stovetop, so the overwhelming smell of pepper deepens. “Goco and Toon are doing the rest,” she’s telling him, “but theirs aren’t as good as mine. Don’t soak the lentils long enough.”

“I’ll be looking forward to it, ma’am,” the Captain says so very seriously, tilting his head so his helmet seems to bobble. “It’s not often we have real food.”

“And even when we do,” Ahsoka says, with a deliberate look at her captain rather than her host, “that doesn’t mean it’s good.”

“No, sir,” he says. “It sure doesn’t.”

With a glance at the other girl, Barriss asks, “When did you try the same food?” 

Ahsoka grins again, sharp and quick. “It was for a celebration, kind of,” she says. “You omnivores need the weirdest ingredients, I swear. But everything about Murkhana was fucked up, so the cake just fit the trend. Here, I can take that. Thanks so much for doing this, Thema. We all really appreciate it.”

“No need to be thanking me,” the woman says, donning her coat and hat again to brave the chill outdoors. “You’re our guests, and welcome ones. Goco’s got something for you, Commander. She’s the butcher’s chickadee. We’ll be meeting her and all down at the Hall.”

Under her careful instruction, they roll each pasty individually in the flimsi that Firstlight uses for their local journal-letters, then bags them. They each take a bag slung over one shoulder, except Captain Rex, who carries two. When they exit, Barriss finds that the wind’s picked up. Few people are in the lanes between the shanties, but they pass a stoop-backed Twi’lek with skin the same shade as Dyyr’s, who pumps water into a metal bucket by the light of another luma. Thema calls him Pa, asks after his rheumatism, and hurries them onward.

Near their destination, they pass Skywalker lurking in an alley with Master Unduli, Dyyr, and a couple other settlers, but don’t pause to say hello, thankfully. They don’t look as though they’re arguing, but Skywalker gesticulates animatedly. In the fourteen years that Barriss has been in his acquaintance, she’s never known him to be still. No wonder Ahsoka’s turned out the way she has under his tutelage, to be so like him, when having a bond with a mind so constantly in motion must be maddening. 

The Hall is just a bigger version of the houses, filled with long tables, stools, and currently, most of the settlers. After they set their bags where Thema orders, Ahsoka says, “Want to go outside?” and walks out before Barriss can answer. Once they’re free of the crowd, tucked inside the shadow of the building so the moonlight won’t expose them, her friend asks, “Seriously, are you okay?” 

“I’m fine, Ahsoka,” she says, and smiles just to prove it. “A little tired is all. It’s been a long few weeks.” A long few weeks, and longer few years.

Slowly, Ahsoka breathes out, exhaling condensation into the wind. “Yeah, I get that,” she says, like a confession. “I keep missing debriefings because I’m falling asleep. Master Obi-Wan’s snatching sleep where he can get it, and honestly, I don’t think Anakin’s sleeping at all. Once I’m back in hyperspace I’m crashing for the whole time. Are you going back to Coruscant after this?”

Again, Barriss shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “Perhaps. Are you?”

“Nah,” Ahsoka says. “We’re supposed to stabilise here first. I think we’re moving on to somewhere else when we’re done.”

“Does it bother you? Not returning home.” 

Looking out towards the main settlement, to the direction where the masters are, she says, “Sometimes. Sometimes not.”

She would have been so perfect, Barriss thinks. It could have all gone so well.

When Skywalker and Master Unduli round the smokehouse with Master Kenobi, the foreman, and his crew, Ahsoka smiles, mostly to herself, the expression more gentle than any Barriss has seen since her arrival. “Come on,” she says. “We should go get our orders.” It’s just so  _ easy,  _ the way she says it. So easy that Barriss might just hate her for it. 

Master Kenobi’s the one going with the workers and their families into the mines, Skywalker says, announcing it to the settlers in the Community Hall. He doesn’t say that it’s to save his padawan from returning underground, but Barriss understands his intention. Master Unduli’s lips thin from disapproval. Clearly, she agrees that his attempt to protect Ahsoka will only damage her more, but that is and always has been the danger of attachment.

It’s not a surprise that Skywalker misunderstands this, though it is a surprise that the others are all falling in line with his decision. When Barriss met him, it was in the standard lessons for their age group—nine for him, and soon to be nine for her. He couldn’t read for the first few weeks, nor could he write, and only aged out of those lessons on a technicality, as he entered the Order as a padawan. But they remained in the same training courses for years, the ones meant to teach Jedi younglings how to utilise the Force and wield their lightsabers. He threw fights in the latter, like he thought beating his sparring partner was inevitable and, therefore, was doing them some great favour. In the former, she never witnessed his supposed power. Their instructors in both tried to push him, but he never seemed to learn the lesson. This was only natural, as he was too old and too mercurial to ever be taught properly. Everyone knew it. Most people weren’t shy about saying it, either.

Somehow, he’s the only one of their agemates still alive who’s a Knight. Who was  _ made  _ a Jedi Knight before he was twenty. That’s almost as nonsensical as this damn war. Rumour has it that it’s because he’s skilled, which she doesn’t entirely disbelieve, but she’s come to understand by now about propaganda and the way it works. Truly, she thinks as she watches him detail the steps of his plan, Ahsoka deserved so much better.

He turns the floor over to Master Kenobi and Dyyr, who organise the settlers into orderly groups for temporary evacuation, and joins his padawan. “Ready for the cellars?” he asks all of them, Barriss and Master Unduli included, but really just Ahsoka, who crosses her arms and sulks at his fretting. 

“You’re certain that there will be an attack?” Barriss answers, frowning. For the first time, he looks at her directly, and with a jolt, she realises that his pupils are too dilated for the amount of light the hanging glowrods radiates. A stimshot to keep him awake for the apparent imminent attack or a painkiller, she reasons. Either way, the sight is disquieting. 

“I’m going to activate the tracking beacon on Obi-Wan’s ship,” he says, and blinks. “I’d do mine, but I’m pretty sure the head of the Procurement Office would murder me if I got it destroyed. They’ll be here before daybreak.” 

“But the tactical droid—”

“Won’t expect a thing. What Jedi’s an idiot enough to activate a tracking beacon to an inhabited settlement?” 

_ You, evidently,  _ she thinks, more than a little testily, as Master Unduli says, “I’ll supervise the troopers as they take position,” as though they hadn’t spent days discussing contingency plans for Skywalker’s reckless tactics. “Barriss, you’re with me. Padawan Tano, you will be responsible for watching the entrance to the mines.”

“When Obi-Wan gives us the all clear,” Skywalker says, “we can regroup under the Hall’s cellar and wait. The  _ Resolute’s  _ on standby to start the aerial battle. The Admiral’ll contact us when the Separatist ships enter their radar.” 

Skywalker crafted a neat little trap for the Droid Army, but his bait is his troops and innocent civilians. For three hours after he activates the tracking beacon, she sits in a pitch-black cellar with Ahsoka beside her and the settlers’ belongings scattered around them, and listens to the girl forcing herself to breathe evenly as Barriss contemplates explosives. The plan should have worked. It was foolproof. Justified. It should have worked, but it didn’t, and now she’s stuck as an accomplice to this foolhardy, unjust ploy, as complacent in this conflict as the rest of her Order. There’s no guarantee the tactical droid will fall prey to the beacon, and there’s no guarantee that the GAR will win. As always, Skywalker left open too many loose ends.

Still. The Separatists attack one hour before dawn.

Above ground, the droids shriek as the traps activate, shorting their circuits in batches. When their comlinks flash twice, Barriss, Ahsoka, and the troops with them rush out from the cellar, catching the droids remaining from the first wave and those arriving in the second off guard, as Skywalker and Master Kenobi promised they would. Barriss doesn’t think; she falls into the usual pattern of parry, evade, strike. Droids are all programmed to fight the same. After so long at war, the same is true for the Republic.

She cuts through a clustering of commando droids and their accompanying droideka, and vaults onto the nearest shanty’s roof, where she thrusts two B-1 models away from the shield generator. For the moment, they’re doing what they should, and deflecting any aerial attack or third wave. Above the dome, Skywalker’s flagship wages battle against two heavy cruisers, and inside, here in the lanes between the shacks and on the rocky terrain around them, is chaos. The sky above the peaks lightens from navy to indigo as the stars fade, but it’s not yet daybreak. 

Below, Master Unduli beats away the spider droids attempting to corner her by a water pump, and in the space in front of the Community Hall that the residents call the square, Skywalker and Ahsoka dismantle tanks as a seamless team. “That’s four, Skyguy!” Barriss hears her friend call, a laugh coiled in her voice, as the weapon in front of her loses its gun. They’re different than Barris expected. She hasn’t seen them fight together before, and not recently. Each takes one half of the square, working with the clone troopers to avoid the area’s destruction; they’re quick and acrobatic and their forms too fluid for easy recognition. As soon as they cut down one droid, another appears, but only because most of the active attack force is funnelling towards them. That must be the Separatists’ intention: remove the General and his Commander.

“Hey!” Ahsoka adds, and points down the street leading to the mountain’s main trail. It’s the tactical droid, Barriss sees, riding with a pack of other tanks in the style of a military parade down the road.

“On it!” he says, though a nearby explosion swallows down his answer. He says it, but Barriss is closer. She pivots on the rooftop, her shoes screeching on the metal, prepared to end this fight before risk of this settlement’s levelling rises any further, except the tactical droid is flying from its seat down the street before she can even leave her perch, passing over its allies heads and right down into a swipe of Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber.

_ Before  _ was not chaos, she finds. After the tactical droid’s quick elimination, Firstlight descends into absolute mayhem.

There’s a third wave, and then a fourth. Barriss doesn’t track the number of droids she reduces to scrap, unlike Skywalker or Ahsoka, but she’s light-headed from a waste of it all by the time day dawns with all its blustering, cold sunshine over the highest summit. A proximity burn from a blaster bolt aches just below her left knee, and her hand shakes around her hilt. She avoids using the Force. It’s all wrong today, like someone transformed it into liquid. Maybe the feeling’s just hers, in her head, or maybe it’s pollution from the War. Maybe it’s Skywalker, who flicks the parading half of the fourth wave up into the ray shield with a twitch of his hand, so all their circuits die. 

In their training as younglings, the only aspect of the Force he ever showed any classroom proficiency in was the ability to disappear. 

The battle ends when the heavy cruisers retreat, leaving behind contorted, broken metal and sparking wires all glinting in the sun. Master Unduli directs the troops to collect the intact heads of any droid marked for a command position as they regroup in the settlement square while Skywalker coordinates the collection of the dead and injured with his captain and Ahsoka waves the medic away from her arm. “I think I can apply my own bacta patches, Kix,” she says, and rolls her eyes again when he asks bluntly, but yeah, will she?

Not five minutes earlier, Barris applied a patch to the burn below her knee. “Are you hurt?” she says when she falls into step beside the younger girl at the square’s edge, furrowing her brow. 

“Just a flesh wound,” Ahsoka says, and raises her elbow to show a nasty scrape. Ash and dirt dust her clothes and skin, same as the rest of them. “You? You’re limping.” 

“It’s not serious,” Barriss answers. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

Frowning, Ahsoka says, “Why wouldn’t I be?” 

“There’s always the—”

“Snips,” Skywalker says, raising his voice to get her attention from across the space, “I think we need your help?”

The “we” is he and Master Unduli. She stands with her hands on her hips and head downcast to something on the ground while he crouches and pokes that something with lightsaber’s hilt. With a small smile, Ahsoka says, “Sorry,” and weaves through the dead and the broken metal towards their masters, leaving Barriss there, alone, among the battle’s aftermath. 


End file.
